The Rise of the New Left Urbanists

America’s big cities are, without exception, politically blue cities, with a new class of progressive politicians doing real damage to public order. When it comes to urban development, however, the blue monolith breaks down: socialists, city planners, cyclists, environmentalists, pragmatists, and social-justice activists are often at odds with one another. They might all support more housing, more density, and more public transportation, but they disagree sharply on the means for getting there.In recent years, a new faction has emerged in city politics: what one might call the new Left urbanists. These activists believe that local governments must rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads, and tolls—to produce a new era of city flourishing, characterized by social and racial justice and a net-zero carbon footprint. The urbanists rally around provocative slogans like “ban all cars,” “raze the suburbs,” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—ironically, since they’re generally white, affluent, and educated themselves. They’re often employed in public or semipublic roles in urban planning, housing development, and social advocacy. They treat public housing, mass transit, and bicycle lanes as a kind of holy trinity—and they want to impose their religion on you.Housing is the central political battleground for these progressive activists. As David Madden and Peter Marcuse write in their book, In Defense of Housing: “The residential is political—which is to say that the shape of the housing system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and classes.” Their goal is not simply to get new housing built but to build new housing owned, operated, and controlled by the state. If they can dictate how cities construct new housing, their logic goes, they can dictate how people live—and set right society’s economic, social, and moral deficiencies.